Aiming for patient safety in the networked healthcare environment.

For some years, the automation of hospital administrative work flow has been seen as a means to reduce costs associated with delivering healthcare. The publication of the Institute of Medicine report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System,1 which documented a high level of mistakes in patient clinical care, and the subsequent report, Crossing the Health Care Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century,2 added patient safety to the benefits to be gained with automation. Healthcare institutions and the industry that provides them with information technology (IT) products endorsed both reports and sought to rapidly implement solutions that would improve both the cost and the safety of healthcare. From the beginning, these solutions acknowledged that privacy of medical data was a concern, and the need to address it when automating was clear. But there was little discussion of the potential for new safety risks being created with additional automation. Research and development work targeted how to connect clinical information to networks, with data security being seen only as a possible privacy concern. As often happens when one problem is solved, new problems that had not been considered began to make an appearance.